Elliott “Spike” Maynard, Republican candidate for the U.S. House in the 3rd District, answered six questions posed to him by members of The Register-Herald editorial board earlier this week.



What opportunities do you see for diversifying the economy of West Virginia?

“We can create jobs in West Virginia in the field of tourism. In West Virginia, we have long missed the boat and not really heavily developed tourism. Our tourism people have done a pretty good job, but we need them to do a spectacular job. We are seeing it come in West Virginia finally, but we’ve missed a couple big bets, like the Hatfield-McCoy feud. The feud happened in southern West Virginia. It’s famous worldwide and we should have a huge tourism project based on the Hatfield-McCoy feud. We should have a museum. We should have, every year at the amphitheater near here, Hatfield-McCoy and nothing else. We ought to have a guided tour of the famous places where feud events occurred. That’s one we haven’t developed.

“We are doing a pretty good job with the skiing industry. Skiing is really taking off in West Virginia. We’ve done a great job with whitewater rafting. It’s been really great for West Virginia. The tourism people have done a spectacular job of promoting it.

“The biggest success we’ve had is the (Hatfield-McCoy ATV) Trail System. I see it in Williamson on the weekends, it is huge. You walk down the street in Williamson or Matewan on the weekend and half the cars you see will be from out of state. Actually they will be pickup trucks, with trailers with ATVs on them. I have a friend who runs a bed and breakfast in Matewan, he’s booked six nights a week the entire year. It’s really brought a lot of money. I frankly think the trail system will be our largest tourist attraction and will produce more money in tourism than anything else. That’s how big I think it is and will be.

“We need to quit spending money on some things, but we need to spend money on tourism.

“This is the one time where we stand the chance to surpass the Eastern Panhandle. If we do it smart, and we can do it smart, it doesn’t take that much money. We just need to advertise a little bit. The more diversified the economy is, the better it is for everybody. Tourism means jobs and they’re fast jobs. You don’t need to build a big plant to create tourism jobs.

“To have tourism, you have to have infrastructure too. We really have to focus on building roads. We need to build the King Coal Highway. We need to build the Coalfields Expressway. We need to build any four-lane highway we can build. When you build a four-lane highway, you bring people in here who will spend money, lots of money. When people are touring, they spend two or three hundred dollars a day. That’s big money.

“That’s where we should be spending our money, not on creating government jobs in Washington, D.C., or jobs in China, which this administration really has done. My opponent says ‘no,’ but it’s the truth. They created 6,000 jobs in China making windmills and it is an outrage and a disgrace. Those jobs could have been in Beckley, West Virginia, and they should be in Beckley, West Virginia. They’re in China.”



If you had to cut one federal program or agency, which one would it be? Why?

“There are so many that it is hard to pick one. Let me pick an agency. The federal EPA. The EPA is the tip of the spear pointed at the heart of southern West Virginia today. They are the people who are waging the war against coal miners and coal miners’ jobs. The generals in that war are Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. The EPA needs to be defunded and disbanded and that’s my life’s work when I get to Washington is to defund the EPA.



Will the EPA always have an adversarial relationship with West Virginia or is there room for compromise, and is climate change a real issue and what role does West Virginia play in the future of the environment?

“My opponent told this newspaper, a few months back — we’ve got it, we’ve got the story out of your paper — he told this paper that the EPA, that nobody should be surprised about what’s going on. That the review of all these permits was expected and the EPA was just doing its job. The EPA is trying to destroy our entire way of life in southern West Virginia. You can’t overestimate how cruel and how far-reaching what they are doing is. They want to take the jobs of people that will never find a job again. They are going to take 40 percent of our coal production, which means four out of every 10 jobs in southern West Virginia, and my opponent says they’re just doing their job? That’s an outrage. If their job is to destroy our way of life and take our jobs, then yes, they are doing their jobs.

“As we sit here this afternoon, the EPA is working to destroy surface mining in the 3rd District of West Virginia, so the EPA needs to be disbanded. Work with them? With the present leadership ... The lady that heads the EPA is a woman named Lisa Jackson who told Congresswoman (Shelley Moore) Capito when she went to have a meeting with her, was (asked if) if she understood the impact of this program — what it was going to mean to the people of southern West Virginia, to the working moms and to the dads who depend on their coal mining job to send their kids to school and make their house payment. Did she understand what it meant? She said, ‘that’s not my problem. I’m not in the jobs business. I’m in the environmental protection business.’ So I don’t know how you work with someone like that.

“These people don’t care about the impact they are having on southern West Virginia families. They are cruel and they are heartless. I don’t know how you can work with them. I would much prefer to have someone there who really won’t conduct economic war and who does care about the consequences about the actions they take. The need to care about people.

“These people are really mean to do this. They intend to abolish southern West Virginia jobs by the thousands. So I am happy to try to work with anybody. ... Those people mean to destroy us. They are hard-core, radical-liberal environmentalists at the EPA. I could live with an EPA that was fair and reasonable, but the one we have now is not. They are tyrants and dictators, if you’ll let me engage in name-calling, but that’s what I think about them.

“They shouldn’t even have the power to do what they are doing. It’s undemocratic, they are not elected, nobody ever voted for them. They shouldn’t be able to have the power to take people’s livelihoods away from them. We need different people to run the EPA. Maybe you could work with reasonable people.”



The Federal Highway Trust Fund is broke and funding is limited at both the federal and state level. How we do move forward in the future to ensure we can build and maintain new roads and bridges and maintain the ones we already have?

“Well, I’ll tell you what we don’t need. We don’t need any more toll roads. They are getting ready to upgrade Route 35, which is not in my district. I’m running in the 3rd District, but we’re all West Virginians and what happens in places like Putnam County affects all of us. Whether you like it or not, we are all coal people. Even if you live in Putnam County where they don’t mine it, you are still a part of the coal people thing. We don’t need to build any more toll roads. We need to stop taking money out of the Highway Trust Fund to do other things with. They’ve been stealing from it, robbing it for years. ... That fund should be used to build highways only — and maintenance, of course. That’s all it should be used for.

“The Congress passed that stimulus package. It is about a trillion dollars now with interest. Now think about this, a trillion dollars. We didn’t get one penny for Coalfields Expressway in that stimulus, not a penny. Nothing for King Coal Highway. We didn’t get anything for Route 35, which I know is not in my district and maybe shouldn’t talk about it ... That’s appalling we didn’t get money for those highways. The King Coal Highway — a large part is done and paved; we just need to connect it up. We got a big new school in Mingo County that is right on the edge of that road. There’s a four-lane highway there that no one can drive on.

“There is no better economic engine, nothing you can do that is better than building a four-lane highway if you want to create jobs. If you don’t believe that, let’s get in a car here in Beckley and go over to Eisenhower Drive and you can see it right there. You can go to any four-lane highway that’s built anywhere in the country and there’s shopping centers and Walmarts and gas stations and muffler shops. Those things all mean jobs. Our highway system is the skeleton we hang the flesh on.

“We’re spending money like drunken sailors creating government jobs in Washington, D.C., and building windmills in China and giving foreign aid to countries that are not our friends. Why we do any of that in the name of economic development is beyond me. Economic development is building roads, building bridges and repairing the bridges that we’ve got. Half our bridges are unsafe and we need to spend our money on the things that matter.

“We’ve been campaigning for six or seven months. My campaign probably has spent three or four hundred dollars on tolls on the West Virginia Turnpike. We are going to spend $12 today, just riding the turnpike. ... We can afford 12 bucks, I guess, but that road being a toll road is a real job killer. It’s a horrible job killer.

“The tolls on that turnpike are job killers and there ought to be an incentive to take the tolls off of every interstate highway. No interstate highway ought to be a toll road. None. Our future is tied to roads. It’s just that simple. If you want to diversify the economy, you need roads to do it. If you want tourists to come here, they will not come on two-lane roads with potholes in them. They won’t come.

“Everyone running will tell you how beautiful West Virginia is, but by golly, the truth is that it is. She sure is pretty this week. It’s beautiful out there today. People will come here if we give them roads to drive on and something to do when they get here. That’s my job as a congressman.”

Historically, West Virginia politicians have often brought money to the state in the form of earmarks in the federal budget. Do you support the practice of earmarking federal funds?

“Earmarking may be good for the people who have a lot of influence in Washington. It may benefit your home area, but it’s really bad for the country. It’s one of the reasons we have the economic mess we have today. Earmarking does a lot more than just get you a local project for your district. It makes the entire process of taxing and spending corrupt. It’s really a bad thing for America. We had it in West Virginia for a long time. It was so bad in West Virginia, the corruption of it and the unfairness of it was so bad, we abolished it. We’ve profited by abolishing it. Nationally, we need to leave that system in the dust of American history. It’s a bad practice and it hurts our country.

“We’ve reached a place where we all need to be patriots first and do what’s best for the country. You’ve got to do what’s best for the country, even if it pinches a little at home. Earmarking is a bad system.”



If elected and there was one thing you could do for West Virginia, what would it be?

“My wildest daydream would be to four-lane every road in southern West Virginia because I think it would put us on the map. If you drive through eastern Kentucky today where they have all those four-lane highways there, it is amazing how different it is. It is amazing in Kentucky.

“The highways are really what made the difference. We really need to build. Route 52 from Bluefield to Williamson is the worst federal highway in the nation. The worst. If we could four-lane that highway, and four-lane Route 10 from Logan to Huntington, it would make such a difference in our people’s lives. We spend enough money in Iraq in a week to do those things. That’s the sad part. We are building roads in Iraq — schools and hospitals and sewage treatment — all the things we don’t have in southern West Virginia and that we need. Our tax dollars can do all that there, we just need to do that here.

“The biggest thing is roads. Four-lane roads. They are wonderful things ... If you could just picture the difference it would make. It would be a big difference in the day-to-day lives of our people. Huge.”

— E-mail: tkuykendall@register-herald.com